Patient Stories | Carol Crum

Want to know the ins and outs of Valley View Hospital? Talk to someone like Carbondale resident Carol Crum, who has been a patient in the Internal Medicine department for more than two decades, and also volunteers at the desk in the Cancer Center.

“I have just been so encouraged by what I see — not only from the doctors, but also with the nurses and the people at registration — everyone who has contact with the patients is compassionate and caring, friendly and treats people almost like they are family,” she says. As a retired nurse, Carol knows a few things about taking care of people, and says while staff can be trained in job skills, empathy, warmth, and treating patients as you’d like to be treated are critically important personal traits in the health care industry.

Carol and her husband followed their two grown children to the Roaring Fork Valley 23 years ago, and for a number of illnesses that required the expertise of an internist, she became a patient of Dr. Susan Inscore soon after. It’s a relationship with not only Dr. Inscore, but with the entire office staff that she has come to rely on.

“Dr. Inscore sets the mood in her office, I believe, with her skills, her compassion and caring, and it’s just so evident in all the staff,” Carol says. “When I had an illness last fall they saw me at my worst when I was very sick. When I went back a month later I received such wonderful, friendly greetings, like ‘Oh, you look so much better,’ and ‘I’m so glad you’re feeling better.’ They were truly concerned, and that is such a plus in any office.”

Over the past 20 years, Carol has watched the hospital grow and bring in more specialists, so the community no longer has to travel to Grand Junction or Denver to receive quality care. “I’m just so pleased that this hospital is just 10 miles from my home, and it has every specialist that a hospital could have.”